Damage Efficiency

So people talk alot about certain characters being more damage Efficent (grave/De Grey) than other characters (Val/Geiger). But I have always wondered exactly what was meant by this. I think in this thread we should try to analyze the damage efficiency of the different characters. I personally would not focus very much on Jaina/Lum/Setsuki since their innates give them essentially infinite damage efficency (especially sets). However if we people want to analyze them its definately worthwhile if they can figure out a good way to consider their innates.

Ok to me the most obvious way to run the analysis would be to figure out the average dmg of a card in the character's deck. For simplicity I just added up the damage and neglected to divide by 14. This requires estimating the average value of double sided cards. It also requires deciding whether things like Midori's 10 should count for damage or not. Anyway here are my results. How I counted the damage is at the end of the post:

Grave-85
his block gives queens

Val - 76
Can get more aces then other chars off straights. Ace draws cards

Geiger - 91
Time spirals hitting blocks makes them do much less damage.

Rook - 113
rook loses card efficiency off RA/3B/Q-pump

Midori - 106
2 was counted for damage but if dragon form it does no actual damage. I counted 10 as 0 dmg lol.

De Grey - 92
+ innate

Argagarg - 72
Bubble shield is very hard to count imo.Also innate is super good and stuff.

Jaina - 78

Lum - 84

Setsuki - 65

Ok so this is not exactly the expected results. Maybe one problem is counting things like 10 throws. Should the average damage of the "good" cards matter more (7T,faces, etc). Idk how people want to do this analysis but I would apreciate any feedback.

The question I have is: how did you handle pump cards? For example, Jaina's Q is nearly always pumped, while Lum's throws almost never are. So, I'm curious as to how this inluences damage efficiency for those characters.

The question I have is: how did you handle pump cards? For example, Jaina's Q is nearly always pumped, while Lum's throws almost never are. So, I'm curious as to how this inluences damage efficiency for those characters.

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It usually doesn't matter because pumping does less damage than the card would by itself, except in a few relatively rare cases. (unless it's a 2 or something... but then you keep the card anyway because a 2 is better than pump unless you're about to win)

I think a more interesting way of analyzing characters would be by calculating the average damage payoff and card expense of a won combat. An even more informative way would be listing a character's bread-and-butter combos and looking at their damage and length, since most characters have a fairly narrow set of actually worthwhile combos.

Yep, I'm with Arghy here. Whenever I've heard people discussing damage efficiency, it's in the context of the damage output of typical combos, rather than a sum of all their possible damage. An advantage of such an approach is the ability to avoid discussions like "is Glipse really a throw?". All that matters is that the throw wins, and then you can discuss what the typical damage options are. That gets a more realistic view of damage output, and then you can discuss efficiency by averaging the damage per card over the range of their best combos.

With this, the question becomes one of which combos to consider and whether or not to give probabilistic weights to certain ones to better reflect their frequency of occurrence. If I didn't have finals breathing down my neck I'd totally throw up some preliminary numbers on this.

I do not think that damage efficiency is worth looking at by itself. Something I think is more interesting would be how this translates into the number of card draws each character needs to win an average game.